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UNOtips.org Blog

Thursday, April 16, 2009

And we're back

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Road Trip!

We've been on the road for three days now. Things have been going well. There was a little drama on the first day when Karl dropped his digital camera and the battery refused to take a charge, but yesterday we found an electronics shop that carried a replacement, so we're all geared up again.Tomorrow's the big day: we hope to be in Chattanooga by tonight and we want to get up bright and early to do our big tour of Lincoln park.The whole team is just buzzing with excitement ... this is like a pilgrimage or something.Can't wait!

Friday, March 6, 2009

Continued Problems in the Forum

First, an apology. As many of you are aware, we continue to have ongoing technical difficulties with the forum. Our technical staff is on the case and they are working as hard as they can.

Now, a tsk-tsk to overzealous forum members.Here at UNOtips.org, we don't like to scold, but it's hard not to say, "We told you so." So let's review the objective of the UNOtips forum. We built the forum as a way for people to share tips and tricks on how to play UNO. It's for UNO lovers, by UNO lovers. It's not a place for you to complain about your job, gloat about your favorite sport team's most recent victory, or engage in endless exchanges about Babylon 5 and Star Trek Voyager. It's built for UNO.

And since it's a moderated forum, our volunteers have to patrol this content. Not to get too technical here, but in essence, all of these off-topic posts bring the system down as our moderators need to use some very clunky technology to find and delete these posts.

So, for every fifteen posts about VHS vs Betamax, our volunteers have to delete the posts and republish the index fifteen times. And that slows the system down for everybody.

Finally, some good news.UNOtips recently received a significant grant from one of our long-standing members to help solve this problem. In the coming months, we will be using the funds from this grant to rebuild our forum technology from the ground up. Our hope is to have almost fully automated moderation (the goal here is to reduce the number of volunteers from fifteen to two) and a much larger server on which to store the data. Target launch date is currently September 1st, 2009.

In the mean time, we should be able to get the forum working again, so keep those UNO tips coming!

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Welcome to the UNOtips.org Blog

We've had so many requests from the UNOtips community to start a blog that we've finally decided to take the plunge. Everyone seems to love the site's new design, and we hope that you'll love our new blog, too!